Finn Allen, 100 runs, 33 balls: How T20 World Cup cricket history was made

Kolkata’s Eden Gardens has staged epics before, but never a semi-final ambush quite like this. What was supposed to be South Africa’s coronation as the tournament’s unbeaten heavyweight became instead the Finn Allen hour: a 33-ball century that catapulted New Zealand into the T20 World Cup final and re-wrote the record books in the process.

Chasing 170 after South Africa had laboured to 169 for eight, Allen and fellow opener Tim Seifert produced a 117-run stand in 9.1 overs that left the Proteas’ vaunted attack flailing. The 26-year-old Aucklander reached his hundred with five balls of the 13th over still to come, carving Marco Jansen for four, four, six, six, four to finish 100 not out and seal a ten-wicket rout.

The innings eclipsed Chris Gayle’s 2016 47-ball hundred in Mumbai as the fastest in competition history and came against a quartet including Kagiso Rabada, Jansen, Lungi Ngidi and Keshav Maharaj. Allen faced only four scoreless deliveries, struck eight sixes and ten fours, and scored 76 of his runs in boundaries. The pull yielded two sixes and a four; the pitch map glowed red in every arc from backward square to extra cover.

For South Africa, the defeat extends a jarring pattern: ten semi-final exits in their last 12 global events. Jansen, whose unbeaten 55 off 30 balls had lifted his side to a defendable total, leaked 53 from 17 balls in the field; Corbin Bosch bled 35 from 12.

Allen, who turned down a national contract last year to freelance in T20 leagues, had already signalled his destructive potential with a 52-ball 151 for San Francisco Unicorns in Major League Cricket, an innings that included a world-record 19 sixes. Yet even that, he admitted with typical modesty, may have been eclipsed on Wednesday night.

“I’d say it was pretty up there,” he smiled at the presentation. “We wanted to put them on the back foot early. It’s easy for me when Timmy’s going like that and I can just watch and hit it when it’s in my area.”

The knock will almost certainly accelerate Allen’s entry into the Indian Premier League spotlight. Kolkata Knight Riders secured his services for two crore rupees this season; after an unbeaten 100 on their home deck, that fee now looks loose change.

New Zealand, long the tournament’s affable dark horses, are one victory away from a first men’s World Cup title of any kind. Should India overcome England in the second semi-final, Allen’s next appointment will be another blockbuster, this time in Ahmedabad on Sunday.

For South Africa, the wait for an ICC white-ball crown stretches beyond the 1998 Knockout Trophy. The chokers tag, so cruelly affixed since Edgbaston 1999, remains firmly, frustratingly intact.

Paul Newman